Refugees in international relations

368 Pages·2011·21.685 MB·English

by  Betts, Alexander

REFUGEES IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
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Refugees in
International
Relations
Edited by
ALEXANDER BETTS AND GIL LOESCHER
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher 2011
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First published 2011
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ISBN: 978-0-19-958074-3 (Hbk)
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3 5 79 10 864
To our students in Forced Migration Studies
and International Relations
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Foreword by Hedley Bull
Hedley Bull, the pre-eminent British scholar of international relations during
the 1970s and early 1980s, wrote and lectured widely on international relations.
His interests spanned practically the entire field of international politics at that
time: nuclear strategy, development issues, ethics, justice and international
affairs, the United Nations and international institutions, and world society,
order, and authority.
While we were preparing the manuscript for this book, Claudena Skran, a
former student of Bull's, brought to our attention a previously unpublished paper
of his entitled 'Population and the Present World Structure' written some time in
the early 1980s. She told us that during her time at Oxford, he showed an interest
in the refugee issue in international relations and encouraged students to under-
take research on the topic. For example, in 1983 he prepared a list of possible topics
for graduate research students at Oxford. On that list was 'the refugee problem in
world polities'. It seems he had become interested in refugees because of their
connection to development topics and because of the African refugee issues at
that time.
Claudena also recounted visiting Bull at his home in north Oxford in 1985 just
a few weeks before he died. He was quite ill then, but was still seeing students and
giving advice. Among the things he discussed with her was the conflict in Biafra.
Claudena recounts that Bull told her that the Ibos had paid a very high price for
order in that civil war. While she could not remember the rest of the conversation
exactly, the meaning that she took away from their meeting was that refugees
were connected to broader issues relating to order and justice and that forced
migration was worthy of study and attention by both graduate students and
advanced scholars in international relations.
Bull's paper 'Population and the Present World Structure' reflects his interest
in development, injustice, and the inequality between the Global North and
Global South.
The paper also discusses the significance of migration and refugee issues. In
particular, Bull recognized the importance of strategic, political, and economic
causes underlying most population movements. He lists as the primary causes:
anti-colonial struggles, conflicts in newly independent states, ethnic cleansing,
internal conflicts and foreign intervention, and human rights violations. Migra-
tion also occurs because of inequalities between the Global North and Global
South with regard to economic conditions and opportunities, social well-being,
and access to liberty and freedoms.
viii Foreword—Hedley Bull
For those of us writing about refugees, migration, and international relations in
the twenty-first century. Bull's analysis in this paper also remarkably foreshadows
many pressing contemporary issues. He raises as concerns the mixing of refugee
and migrant flows (today's so-called asylum-migration nexus), increasing state
and popular concerns over sovereignty and control of borders, the growing fears
and restrictionist attitudes and policies of the industrialized states, the growth and
influence of diaspora networks, the importance of global information networks,
and the spread of long-distance transport. These are among the key issues of
concern to scholars, governments, and international organizations today.
We reproduce below a section of Hedley Bull's paper entitled 'Population and
Migration' which we believe was written in the early 1980s, probably for presen-
tation at a conference.
Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher
One way in which the pressure of population on the resources of poor coun-
tries may be relieved is through migration to places where resources are more
plentiful. Some Third World governments seek to encourage migration of
their surplus population to Western countries, or other areas of the Third
World, such as the oil-producing states of the Middle East; some, like Mexico
and Cuba, not merely demand entry into the United States for their surplus
population, but speak as if entry were a moral right conferred by history or
by present poverty. Such claims, moreover, do gain some recognition in
those circles in the West in which there is sensitivity to global economic
injustice.
From the point of view of poor sending countries, the benefits of this
migration are clear enough. The migrants themselves escape from depriva-
tion to a better standard of life, and, if they have gone voluntarily, show by
their going at least that they themselves believe that they will benefit. Those
that are left behind may benefit from remittances, from no longer having to
provide sustenance for those that have departed, and from reduced burdens
of welfare. The sending country as a whole will have lost actual or potential
labour, and in the case of highly skilled migrants may suffer the effects of the
'brain-drain', but it may stand to gain from the export of unemployment, the
acquisition of revenue and foreign exchange from remittances, and a safety-
valve for the release of social tensions. The high growth rates following mass
emigration from southern European countries in the postwar period and the
advantages derived by South Asian countries from migration to the Gulf area
in the 1970s provide illustrations of these benefits.
Emigration from Third World countries, which today has reached massive
proportions, does not in itself necessarily contribute to the goal of a just
Foreword—Hedley Bull ix
geographical distribution of population in relation to available resources, nor
imply any demand for it. The causes of emigration from Third World coun-
tries in the post-1945 era have been as much political as economic in nature:
anti-colonial wars (as in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s), the oppression and
sometimes expulsion of minorities by newly independent states dominated
by particular ethnic groups (as of the Chinese in Indochina, Asians in east
Africa, non-Amharic speaking peoples in Ethiopia), civil wars coinciding
with foreign intervention (as in east Pakistan in 1971 or Afghanistan at
present). The countries that have received the greater part of the migrants
are not those of the West, nor indeed the oil-rich segment of the Third World,
but other poor Third World countries (at present Sudan, Zaire, Somalia,
Thailand, Pakistan, Jordan, Mexico). The mode of transport involved in
much of this migration is by foot to a neighbouring state and is not a reflec-
tion of modern transport technology.
Nevertheless, the issues raised by these population movements almost
invariably take us back to the perception that the present geographical distri-
bution of population in relation to wealth, as between the West and the Third
World, is an unjust one. First, there is in fact a great demand in Third World
countries for migration into the rich Western countries, fed by the urge to
escape from poverty, oppression, and instability in Third World countries, by
the lure of economic opportunity, liberty, and security in the West, by the
spread of information about the difference of conditions in different parts of
the world, by the growth of social networks that facilitate the movement of
migrants and their settlement in receiving countries, by the increasing ease
and declining cost of long-distance transport, by the removal of barriers of
racial and ethnic discrimination in the immigration and internal social poli-
cies of the receiving Western states, by the responsibilities recognized by
Western countries towards migrants acknowledged to be 'refugees', by the
bridgeheads established by those admitted as temporary migrants, and by the
inability or unwillingness of Western governments to cope effectively with
illegal migrants. The fact that the Western countries receive only a small
proportion of total emigrants from the Third World reflects the barriers that
exist to it, rather than lack of pressure for it.
Moreover, even where emigrants from Third World countries do not
directly seek entry into them, the Western countries are often perceived—by
themselves as well as others—to have special responsibilities in the matter,
imposed by their wealth and resources. This is especially so when the migrants
involved may be regarded as refugees. By long tradition, refugees are a privi-
leged class of migrants (if in other respects under-privileged), in respect both
of their claims of entry into receiving states (the so-called right of asylum)
and of their claims to just treatment after entry. Where the concept of a